The new features were among announcements Google Cloud made
Tuesday to kick off its annual customer conference, which is being held
virtually this year due to the pandemic.
The leading Western cloud vendors Google, Microsoft, and
Amazon have been competing on sustainability offerings for years. They aim to
serve companies that are under pressure from stakeholders to rethink operations
in light of climate change.
Google’s new carbon footprint reporting tool, similar to one
Microsoft already provides, shows the emissions associated with the electricity
that was used to store and process a customer’s data. In addition, Google will
now warn customers when they are wasting energy on inactive cloud services.
The new mapping offering, Google Earth Engine, had been used
by tens of thousands of researchers, governments and advocacy groups since
2009. But Google now is letting businesses in on the service, which includes
many huge geospatial datasets such as Landsat and the software needed to
analyse them. Amazon has a similar initiative.
“This is something we have now realised is applicable to a
lot of these commercial opportunities,” said Jen Bennett, a technical director
at Google Cloud.
Earth Engine could help ensure supply chains are sustainable
and predict operation challenges from extreme weather, according to Google.
Unilever Plc, which tested the technology for the past 12 months, scrutinised
its palm oil sources in Indonesia, though it could not be learned whether that
led to any shifts in practices. © Reuters
0 comments:
Post a Comment